Column

Shoes in the news! The Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi who, a year or so ago threw his shoes at President Bush was released from prison this week and emerged to a hero’s welcome. He has served nine months of a three year sentence which was reduced on appeal to one year as he had no previous convictionsand then again for good
behaviour in jail.

The TV and internet footage of the shoe assault has been screened repeatedly. President Bush is sitting next to Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki on the podium when the shoes come flying at him, one after the other, from the aisle dividing the audience of reporters and photographers.

Bush dodges both shoes by ducking in feints probably perfected on the baseball pitch and the joothe fall harmlessly behind him. The assailant al-Zaidi is immediately seized by colleagues and carried away by security guards and the police.

He now alleges that he was tortured in prison, subjected to electric shocks, water-boarding, repeated beatings and to guards putting out cigarettes on his forehead. As he emerged from prison he was greeted by large crowds and hundreds of offers of marriage, of money and of jobs as a presenter on TV networks. He has now gone to Greece for medical tests alleging that he was injected with unknown chemicals in jail and suffers constant headaches.

In the west a shoe would be just another missile, not as dangerous as a stone, brick, wooden baton or piece of metal, but as we well appreciate in India, the metaphorical disgrace of being assaulted with footwear exceeds any physical damage that a small arm-wielded missile might do. In addition al-Zaidi called Bush a ‘dog’, which I am told in Iraq and in the Muslim world is a grave insult.

I have always wondered, as have others with whom I have compared notes, what sort of creature a ‘Schweinehundt’, the German abuse meaning ‘pig-dog’ is. Is it some composite creature out of Wagner? So shouldn’t the pig, an equally or even more reviled creature than a dog in Muslim zoologistics, be verbally paired with ‘dog’ (as in the German) to make an even stronger Iraqi abuse? I am tempted to copyright the Arabic translation of ‘pig-dog’ and rent it out to Iraqi abusers worldwide.

Now if al-Zaidi were Indian, he would not only take up the offers of marriage and employment but I am sure he would be assailed by PR men and shoemakers to endorsebrands of shoes and could make a lot of money signing individual pairs.

The original pair must even now be being auctioned by some unscrupulous Baghdadi policeman, just as the pens, prison slippers and other accessories and accoutrement of the leaders of the Indian freedom struggle who went to jail for their convictions have been sold to museums and other bidders.

In England there is another shoe story doing the rounds this week. The annual Conference of the Trades Union Congress has passed a resolution to compel employers to no longer insist that their female employees wear high heels.

Air hostesses, receptionists and some shop assistants have been compelled to wear them by their employers and now the heroic proletarian battle for the flat shoe is on. In case you think this is a joke just consider the statistics provided by the shop steward of the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists, Lorraine Jones who said that 2 million working days are lost every year through lower limb and foot related problems because of high heels and the loss of these days costs the economy £300 million. Wowee!

I wonder if one of those absurdly tall high-heeled shoes, if flung at a politician, would spin and return to sender as a boomerang does. I think I shall wear high heels and go to one of Gordon Brown’s conferences posing as a DNA columnist.